The Devil You Know

She sat down opposite me, in silence. I finished the cup, and she offered me hers.

“Nobody blames you,” she said, at last. “Nobody thinks you screwed up.”

“I did screw up.”

“You tried to help him. It didn’t work. Nobody else could have done anything.”

I was sorry I’d mentioned it. Honesty isn’t usually a vice I indulge, but with Pen, you get into the habit. She never lies—not even the white kind that spare feelings and avoid embarrassment. You tend to give her the same courtesy back.

“Maybe nothing would have been the best thing to do,” I muttered.

Exorcism is both more and less than a job. You do it because it’s something you find you can do, and because once you’ve started, there’s something about it that doesn’t let you stop. But, in the long run, it gets to you. Exorcists who live long enough to be old are very strange people indeed—like the legendary Peckham Steiner, who lived the last few years of his life on a houseboat on the Thames and wouldn’t set foot on dry land because he thought the ghosts were about to launch a blitzkrieg on the living, and he was the first target.

I thought about Rafi as he was when I first met him: elegant, selfish, and beautiful, a dancer with a thousand delighted partners. Then I thought about him steaming in that bathtub full of ice water, his eyes shining in the dark, looking as though the fire that was inside him was about to break out through his skin at any moment and leave nothing but black ash.

It wasn’t that I convinced myself I knew what I was doing. I didn’t. I’d never seen anything like this, and it made me literally piss my pants. But it didn’t seem possible to just sit there while Rafi burned; it seemed like I had to do something, and there was only one thing I knew how to do. So I took out my whistle and I closed my eyes for a moment, looking for the sense of him, the fix. Easy. The place was saturated with it. So I started to play—just like in the dream.

At the sound of the first note, the demon Asmodeus hissed and bubbled like a kettle with the lid left off and opened Rafi’s eyes wider than they were meant to go. Weakened from his long climb up from Hell, he clawed at me without strength and cursed me in languages I’d never encountered, but he couldn’t lever himself up out of the bath, and all I had to do was to step back out of his hands’ reach. I played louder to drown out the harsh gutturals that were spitting and frothing on Rafi’s lips.

And it seemed to be working. That’s the only excuse I can give for not thinking it through—not realizing what it was I was actually doing. Rafi’s body twitched and shuddered, and the steam that was boiling off him turned into roiling, curdled light. I was playing faster now, and louder, playing what I could see and feel and hear in my mind, letting the music spill out like scalpels to operate on the world. I was lost in it, mesmerized by it, part of a feedback loop that filled me up with sound as a cup is filled with sweet wine.

Then for a moment the curses stopped, and the writhing thing in the bathtub looked up at me with Rafi’s terrified, pleading eyes. “Fix,” he whispered, “please! Please don’t”—his face twisted. Asmodeus’s features surfaced through Rafi’s like oil through water, and he roared at me like a wounded animal. Except that his horns protruded in clusters through the flesh of his cheeks, and his black-on-black eyes boiled like snake pits.

Idiot though I was, the truth hit me in the face then. Rafi hadn’t been possessed by a ghost at all but by something much bigger and more terrifying. That meant that there was only one human spirit inside him, that the fix I had was on Rafi, not on his ruthless passenger. I was exorcising Rafi’s own spirit from his body.

I almost faltered into silence, but that would have been the worst thing I could possibly do. It would probably have extinguished Rafi’s soul right there and then. Instead I tried to turn the tune into something else—to break it free from the Rafi-sense that filled my head and latch it onto something else.

I played through the night, and the night was endless. The thing in the bathtub flailed and cursed, wept and moaned, laughed drunkenly and begged for mercy. Then the frosted glass of the bathroom window lit up with a dim, weary glow of yellow-pink dawn light. That seemed to be the signal for hostilities to cease. The thing closed its eyes and slept. About a half second later, the whistle fell from my mouth, and I slept, too. I didn’t surface again for eighteen hours.

I woke to the sick realization of what I’d done. I’d managed not to snuff out Rafi’s soul, but in some way I didn’t understand and couldn’t undo, I’d knotted that soul and the demon that was possessing him into one inextricable psychic tangle—turned Rafi and Asmodeus into some obscene ectoplasmic equivalent of Siamese twins.